Thursday, January 15, 2015

In this TED Talk, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes the real differences between the left and right halves of the human brain. Theories of the 1960s and ’70s, gave rise to a lot of speculation on the "different functions" for the two halves of the brain to do, as if it were a machine with a lot of little specialised modules –language here, maths there, or reason here, emotion there. Over time, science discovered that each so-called ‘function’ was carried out in both hemispheres, not one, recognizing that the differences lay not in what they do, but how they do it. So differences are not simply explained by "emotion on the right brain, reason on the left brain," but something far more complex and interesting. https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain